About This Gigapan

This is the Spirit Pancam "Seminole" panorama, acquired on sols 672-677 (Nov. 23-28, 2005 ), as Spirit was descending the southern flanks of Husband Hill over the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The panorama consists of 405 separate images in 5 different Pancam filters, and covers 360 degrees of terrain around the rover.
The first image is an approximate true color rendering using Pancam's 750 nm, 530 nm, and 430 nm filters. Image-to-image seams have been eliminated from the sky portion of the mosaic to better simulate the vista a person standing on Mars would see. The second image is a false color rendering using the same filters, but presented in a way dramatically different from "true color" in order to enhance the many striking but subtle color differences between rocks, soils, hills, and plains in this spectacular scene.
This panorama provides the team's highest resolution view yet of the "Inner Basin" region (center of the image). The bright, semi-circular "Home Plate" feature is harder to discern that before in this more oblique view, which was acquired after Spirit had descended approximately halfway down the south flank of Husband Hill, at an elevation about 50 meters lower than at the summit. McCool Hill and Ramon Hill can be seen on the horizon near the center of the panorama, and the southern slopes of Husband Hill, behind the rover, can be seen along the panoramas left and right edges. Spirit had actually made a long arcing turn around some obstacles to get into position to make chemical and mineral measurements on the outcrop rocks seen in the foreground of this panorama. The rover's tracks can be traced over a long distance during that turn by zooming in to explore the panorama in detail.
Spirit is now significantly farther downhill and into the center of this panorama, heading towards Home Plate and other enigmatic soils and outcrop rocks in the quest to uncover the history of Gusev crater and the Columbia Hills.